New temporary display of works by Xu Bing

Xu Bing (b.1955, Chongqing, Sichuan) is a leading contemporary artist from China renowned for works of art that explore language. To mark his visit to Oxford in March for the 2018 Oxford China Forum and the launch of Professor Peter D. McDonald’s Artefacts of Writing: Ideas of the State and Communities of Letters from Matthew Arnold to Xu Bing (Oxford: OUP, 2017), the Ashmolean is displaying three important works by Xu Bing.

Most famous is his Tianshu ‘Book from the Sky’ (1987-92), which presents 4,000 unintelligible ‘Chinese’ characters created by the artist in four bound volumes, each printed in traditional format using fine materials.

A more recent book, in some sense a companion to it, is Dishu or ‘Book from the Ground’, which uses the pictograms and emojis present everywhere in modern life to narrate a story that everyone can understand. Disrupting reading habits in different ways, the two works raise questions, at once sceptical and creative, about all established forms of writing.

Book cover, Artefacts of Writing, Ideas of the State of and Communities of Letters from Matthew Arnold to Xu Bing by Peter D. McDonald

Xu Bing’s Landscript (2002), in which he has created an ink landscape painting composed of pictographic Chinese characters, using the character for ‘tree’ 木, the stones using the character for ‘stone’ 石, and so forth, completes the display.